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Looking back at my first animated cartoon - Tom Ray's Day 210222

I just recently found the very first cartoon that I did.

I have an idea for a cartoon that I want to do based on a recent character that I drew for a recent promo thing that I did.

image of cartoon sketch and text on white background
This is a pic from the video of the character I was originally looking for when this started.

I swear I sat around and drew different sketch ideas of this character but I can't find them. So I've been going through sketchbooks and stuff, and then I'm like maybe I drew it digitally? So I've started searching on different hard drives. 

As I did this I found a bunch of old artwork that I had.

Then I started going deeper and deeper, all the way back to like the early 2000s when I animated my first cartoon. Back when I first got Flash animation software. 

I'm looking at some of this stuff and it's kind of embarrassing. It's not that I'm that good now, it's just I'm looking at this now thinking, I would fix this and do that. And I still don't really know what the heck I'm doing.

So the cartoon that I did was when my two sons were very young. We did a live segment that went into an animated segment. 

The live-action part was filmed with one of those cameras that you could get for kids where they could make their own movie and it had software too so they could edit their own three-minute movies. 

I recorded the live section and they were supposed to be like big movie stars who wanted to be cartoons.

picture of to boys on a couch drinking root beer.
This is an image of the boys from the live-action segment of the cartoon short

Here is the funny thing, I recorded the audio part for the animation using an old cassette recorder. 

picture of me holding a cassette recorder machine
I used a tape recorder like this to record the audio for my first cartoon

I don't know why recorded on this and then transferred that to the computer digitally? But I recorded it that way, transferred the tape audio. Then I wanted to learn how to do it the old-school way so I read a bunch of animation books. 

Flash software was new when I did this and YouTube didn't exist yet. So I was still learning how I could manipulate or actually do the in-betweens and all that kind of stuff or how I could draw everything as one object and just move them in the software. 

The scene that I animated was only maybe 30 seconds long so it wasn't that big of an undertaking to learn from 

image of two cartoon characters on a yellow background
A picture of the two boys from the animated segment of the cartoon

And actually, if you listen to the audio on it you can hear me hit the stop button on the cassette recording. 

But that was my first attempt at creating an animated cartoon it took me like a week to do this 30-second segment. 

I think I want to look at some of the other older stuff that I have and maybe go through sort of the progression of my animations? I'm trying to find more ways to learn from what I did and continue to work on it. Because at one point I gave up on it completely and then I decided I was going to be a web developer so I gave up on all of this stuff. 

Kind of give some background leading up to why I want to get back into making cartoons or at least accomplish something with it.


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Location: Madison, WI, USA

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